A GIS based operational system for wildland fire crisis management II. System architecture and case studies

摘要

The most important characteristic of major forest fire incidents, from a societal perspective, is their potentiality to seriously and irreversibly damage regions of significant natural beauty. In addition, the extent and severity of such incidents may significantly affect the population and the environment of the adjacent areas. Following a forest fire event, effort should be made to limit such effects. Management decisions should be based on rational and quantitative information based on the site specific circumstances and the possible consequences. To produce such information we have developed an operational system for managing large-scale wildland fire incidents. Its architecture involves an integrated framework of GIS and RDBMS technology systems equipped with interactive communication capabilities. The operational system was developed for Windows 98 platforms, for the region of Penteli Mountain Attika. The fire simulation tool of the operational system that was based on a fuzzyeural system for the estimation of fire spread and a corresponding discrete contour propagation model for estimating fire consequences as a function of influencing factors such as terrain characteristics, vegetation type and density and meteorological conditions was presented in a related work [Appl. Math. Model. 28 (2004), this issue]. Several case studies are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.